“On 24 February 1989, part of the right-side fuselage of United Airlines Flight 811 rips off, ejecting nine people from the aircraft and causing explosive decompression. The flight later lands safely at Honolulu without any more loss of life. It was later determined that an electrical short circuit caused the cargo door to open.” (List of Mayday episodes – Wikipedia)

Yes, this is eduhonesty, the education blog. I started with the plot summary from episode 1 of a solid, documentary series called “Mayday” because of my opening thought:

For the last year, across America, teachers have been fixing the plane while flying it. That’s no easy feat and teachers have not received nearly enough credit for their work. Many of those remote learning classes came together fast. Others came together more slowly as districts fought to obtain broadband and hardware for their students. The long nights, new software, changed plans, and parent phone calls have been steady features of daily life for groups of US teachers, many of whom have been exchanging tips and recommendations with their own children’s teachers as everyone tries to keep students and families in the learning game.

Not all those phone calls have been friendly. Our COVID flight’s been bumpy the whole way and some frazzled parents want to take their rough ride out on the teacher. They probably want to take it out on the water meter reader. Or any handy body that they can use to vent their disappointment, confusion and, yes, even rage.

Moms and dads — mostly moms — who had to give up their jobs to manage in-home learning have every reason to be angry. The best of bad options is still a bad option. Luckier counterparts who have been able to work from home retained their income, but their struggle has been real, and often daunting. In the “old” days, those dads and moms had breaks, occasional minutes for no one but themselves. Now they are on an unexpected, wild ride where the only privacy may be in the bathroom.

The years 2020 and 2021 have proven to be the equivalent of that United Airlines flight to Hawaii. Not all our students will walk away from this mess with their educations intact. Already, teachers and other members of the educational community are asking urgently: How will we catch them up? Especially those kids who hardly ever bothered to log in this year may never catch up. The kid who would not do the last year’s instruction may choose not to do the remedial instruction either. What then?

Eduhonesty: I will go back to my efforts to limit standardized testing shortly, but I thought I’d share today’s thoughts.

Parents and teachers have been doing their damnedest to make daily pandemic life work — and overall they have been doing a great job. The plane has kept flying.

Some learning has been lost, but all across this country tonight, teachers will be grading work that was turned in by students who have been adding vocabulary and practicing new mathematical concepts.

Sometimes, keeping the plane aloft is all we can manage. It’s not 2019. Those comforting rituals and routines from the past come to us now only as echoes from an easier time. We live in a time of masks, hand sanitizer, and Xs and Os positioned six feet apart in lines across the ground. Friends are endlessly refreshing computers, trying to find vaccinations. It’s so easy to dwell on the negative.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the positive. The plague landed on our shores and we did not fold. Some areas have done better than other areas in terms of connectivity and getting devices into student hands, but I believe even this fact has an upside: The disparity in tech and tech access has been slowing down students in poor districts for years. As poor schools got devices into students’ hands and put them on that steep learning curve to begin remote learning, we taught tech skills our students needed. I can’t prove this yet, but I’m sure that the technological learning gap between poor and wealthier schools has narrowed considerably. Remote learning has also exposed the fact that a subsection of our students learn better online; those children may benefit as parents explore online options.

The intense concern for children who lost learning during 2020 and 2021 should also result in a much-needed focus on tutoring. America’s poor districts historically have never been able to scrounge up the funds for the extensive tutoring some students required. Year after year, schools have passed on students who were not ready for their next year’s curriculum, with lack of remediation/tutoring forming a big part of this picture.

I vividly remember one year when my district found enough money for summer school but not enough for summer school busses. Students could go if they wanted to go and could somehow get themselves to school. They did not have to attend, no matter how badly they had done during the school year. “My mom has to work in the morning,” was excuse enough to avoid any summer instruction.

With the spotlight on COVID learning loss, I am hoping legislatures will step up to provide the funding required to pay for the staff — and food, air-conditioning and busses — to make extra tutoring happen in disadvantaged communities. The chance to establish a robust plan for student remediation has never been better.

This post is a thank-you to all the teachers who kept this plane flying while sometimes crying into their beer or coffee. No one could have done it without you, especially in this time of almost-no-subs. YOU made it happen. YOU made it work.

Many virtual hugs to all the teachers out there who just kept fixing that plane, and who are fixing that plane still.

.